Industrial Co-operation and Machine Production

In the last two chapters we have concentrated on production as the production of value and surplus value; now we must consider it as a material process which produces use-values. Ideally, capital would ignore this aspect of production Since it is incidental to accumulation. In fact, it would ignore production altogether if that were possible and reduce its circuit to its bare essentials where money is circulated directly against money (M — M′) This is the ideal world of capital and periodically, in bouts of speculative fever, fantasy takes over as money chases profits far beyond the bounds of reasonable expectation. From the time of the South Sea Bubble to the latest junket with high-rise office blocks and Very Large Crude Carriers the irrationality of capital has regularly expressed itself in a genuine pathology as the frenzied pursuit of wealth in the abstract lays waste to the production of wealth in the concrete. These intermittent crises undoubtedly represent the quintessence of capital and illustrate more vividly than anything else, the human absurdity of organising social life round the principle of accumulation, but they tell us only part of the story. To grasp the historic significance of capital, we must see how it recognises the inevitability of material production and comes to terms with it. The first step is the formal control of production where capital includes it the movement of its own circuit.